As a longtime literary journalist, I have published essays, book columns, and reviews in many national publications—from "The New York Times" to the "Women's Review of Books" to the "Nation"—and I have published three critically acclaimed, and very different, books:
"Lost Among the Baining: Adventure, Marriage, and Other Fieldwork"—a cross-cultural travel memoir (and a love story) about a life-changing journey to Papua New Guinea that reviewers called "provocative," "inspiring," "compulsively readable," and "laugh-out-loud funny."
"Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America"—the first and still the only book to take an in-depth, historical, and tough look at this perennially troubled field. Critics called it "passionate," "thought-provoking," and "mandatory reading."
"Other People's Mail: An Anthology of Letter Stories"—an Editor's Choice selection at the "Chicago Tribune" that reviewers called "entertaining," "moving," and "wickedly absorbing."
For more information about these books, please take a look at my Authors Guild Website (www.gailpool.com), which also includes reviews of travel literature, a field I covered as a book columnist for the "Christian Science Monitor" and have continued to explore.
And please take a look at my latest work, "An Anorexic's Alphabet" (http://www.maprecord.com/FlipBooks), a graphic chapbook that takes readers inside the distorted, intellectualized, defensive, little-understood, and eerily intriguing mindset of the anorexic. (On You Tube at: https://youtu.be/ZmtYdbOtU-s)
I was born in New York City, I attended Hunter College High School, and I concentrated in Ancient Greek at Harvard. For many years, I taught writing at the Radcliffe Seminars and at Emmanuel College. I live with my husband in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Sanibel, Florida.